Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Key Amanda Todd into Google Search and more than 40 million hits come up. They come up virtually every second. The horrific bullying/suicide tragedy of the 15-year-old Coquitlam girl has touched a chord around the world. You’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard about it.

The details are heartbreaking.

A little more than two years ago, the tormented teen made a silly, and ultimately fatal mistake. She flashed her breasts on YouTube, and to hear that horrible expression that we hear all too often these days, the image “went viral.” It wasn’t long before Amanda received a threat from a stranger that if she didn’t put on a “show” the images would go everywhere. And soon they did and Amanda’s life began to unravel. More threats washed over her like a cyberspace tsunami. YouTube, Facebook and all forms of social media. The frightened teen became a social pariah.

Thanks to the joys of digital technology, she was bullied every day. At school. In class. On the school grounds. And on the mean streets outside.  She lost all her friends and self-respect. She would sit alone during lunch breaks and in just one of the almost continuous incidents a classmate told her: “look around, nobody likes you” and when Amanda went outside the classmate’s boyfriend, who Amanda secretly thought really did like her, urged his girlfriend to beat her up which she did, knocking her to the ground while another classmate filmed the incident with her ‘Smart phone.’  Her father found her later in the day lying in a ditch.

That was the day Amanda drank bleach.

“I just felt like a joke,” she said in one of her YouTube posts. Amanda changed schools three times after this, but thanks to ever-present ‘Smart phones’ and omnipresent social media, the harrowing, harassment continued. Finally on Oct. 10, she escaped. How Amanda ‘escaped’ has mercifully not been disclosed. But if you’re a social media fan, you could probably find out if you were sick enough to look.  And I’m sure many are.

What has this world come to?

As a father, who with the help of a good wife, has successfully raised two happy, well-adjusted children, I don’t know what to think anymore. Thank God, our kids were old enough that they missed the brunt of the social media revolution. Our kids never owned Smart phones while they were in school, but they got them as soon as they went to university, admittedly with their parents help. But by then they were mature enough to use them properly and there were never any problems and they proved a great way to keep in touch.

So I’m not a complete Luddite. I acknowledge digital media and social media are here to stay and they bring much good along with the bad. But obviously these are very powerful tools at our disposal now and they’re not meant to be used frivolously or tragedy can ensue. What’s frivolously?  You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Giving pre-school children Smart phones as gifts or ‘toys’ is like giving them a gun to ‘play’ with. Any parent who does that should be turned into the authorities. I’m aging myself here, but I remember when a child’s ‘play’ phone was two tin cans with holes in them and 50 feet of waxed string. Laugh if you will, but there were fewer teen suicides back then.

If you feel compelled to give a pre-teen a phone, give them a basic cell phone which can be used for emergencies and little else. As far as Smart phones go, some parental discretion and judgment goes a long way. Inevitably teenagers will obtain them, but it’s a parent’s responsibility to ensure they’re used responsibly no matter how difficult that may be.

And once again the school system must bear a major portion of responsibility for Smart phone abuse and the cyber-bullying that inevitably accompanies it. It seems when the Smart phone revolution came along school officials just threw up their hands and said they couldn’t deal with it. Instead the educational establishment tried to incorporate the socially toxic instruments into the curriculum and we’ve seen the horrifying results. Yes, they can be used to teach and learn, but they can also be used to bully children to death.

Wake up educators! It’s your responsibility to develop rules and protocols to prevent that. If you can’t do it, you shouldn’t be in the business. But I believe you can. And if you did, Amanda Todd might be alive today.

Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His views are his own.

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